Lectures 7-8.

English Literature in the Thirties and the Forties.

The thirties were a highly political decade in literature. The new generation of poets and prose writers was committed to the left.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907—1973) published his book “Poems” in 1930. His poetry was unconventional, its idiom being modern even slangy. He took up religious, philosophical, political and psychological themes. In 1937 he left to live in the USA. His later poetry was more personal, than the poetry of his younger years. He did not believe any longer that the world could be changed by political action influenced by literature. In the fifties he returned to Europe and lived in Austria.

A poet, who emerged just before the war, was Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Unlike Auden, he was lower-middle class, non-university, permissive. His verse was emotional, he wrote not for fame or money, but to show people their own human feelings, as he said. His play for voices “Under Milk Wood” remains a classic work since 1954.

The most famous dramatists of the period were George Bernard Shaw and John Boynton Priestley (1894-1984).

G.Shaw used the theatre to discuss themes and explore ideas. He expressed himself with much wit, turning upside down the accepted opinions of his time. His sharp manner he takes from Samuel Butler – a writer who brilliantly criticized every theory of his time from Darwinism to Christianity. His works are: “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” “Man and Superman”, “Arms and the Man”, “Pygmalion”, “Heartbreak House”.

J. Priestley was known as a dramatist, novelist and broadcaster. He started as a novelist with “The Good Companions” (1929) and “Angel Pavement” (1930). But success came only with the dramatization of “The Good Companions” in 1932. In 1927 he read the book by W.Dunne “An Experiment with Time” and took an immense interest in it. This resulted in the production of three “time-plays”: “Dangerous Corner” (1937), “I have been Here Before” (1937) and “Time and the Convoys’ (1937). His postwar novels include “Saturn over the Water” (1961) and “It’s an Old Country” (1967).

The prose of the period is marked by the first works of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), a Catholic writer, who declined the call of revolution and reform. He respects the absurdity of conventions as they help to cope with the chaos of life. His early works (“Decline and Fall”, “Vile Bodies”, “Scoop”) are comic as they discuss “the bright little things” of the Jazz Era but in “Brideshead Revisited” (1945) a new note entered Waugh’s prose: if a person does not pay the part arranged by God for him, he fails God.

This is the book of transparent honesty, as well as his later books, which make a trilogy “The Sword of Honour”, though they are full of comic and foolish situations. “The Loved One” (1948) is a satire of American life, describing the tendency in America towards the growing euphemization in all spheres of life.

Graham Greene (1904-1991) is one of the highly respected English novelists in the 20^th century. A key event in Greene’s life was his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1926. His first works are written in the genre of a historical thriller, which deals with guilt, treachery, failure – everything, that became a hallmark of Greene’s fiction later. G.Greene’s early novels are: “The Power and the Glory”(1940), “The Heart of the Matter” (1941), “Our Man in Havana” (1958), “The Quiet American” (1959). Since the fifties he writes political novels, showing how moral decisions involve bigger and bigger groups of people. Though his novels are set in exotic countries, they are always about the British. In the 70-s the writer published a number of important books such as “The Burnt-Out Case”, “The Honorary Consul”, “The Human Factor”.